Kenneth Okonkwo Says Tying Obidient Movement to Peter Obi’s Name Was a Mistake
Kenneth Okonkwo, former spokesperson for Peter Obi’s 2023 presidential campaign, has said the Obidient Movement should never have been named after the former Anambra State governor, arguing that the association left the movement’s fortunes tied directly to Obi’s personal reputation.
Okonkwo made the remarks during an interview on the Selah Meditate Podcast, when asked to describe the Obidient Movement in a single sentence. According to him, the movement grew organically out of a broader push by young Nigerians seeking a better country, and should therefore have retained an identity independent of any single politician. He argued that the movement ought to have remained an unbranded platform for national renewal rather than being explicitly tied to Obi’s name, insisting that attaching a specific individual’s identity to it made the movement structurally vulnerable to whatever happens to that person’s public standing.
Pushing back when reminded that the movement’s emergence was widely credited to Obi’s 2023 candidacy, Okonkwo traced the origins of the push for an alternative political force further back, to conversations around a so-called “third force” that first emerged during the 2019 general election. He explained that although those earlier efforts failed to properly organise themselves at the time, the broader desire for political alternatives among young Nigerians predated Obi’s emergence as a national figure, with Obi later becoming the individual around whom that sentiment coalesced during the 2023 election cycle. He maintained that the movement, in his view, should be understood as a product of a wider generational political awakening rather than as an extension of any single candidate.
Okonkwo’s latest remarks add to a string of increasingly public disagreements between the former spokesperson and his one-time political ally in recent months, with Okonkwo having previously drawn strong backlash over separate comments characterising some of Obi’s supporters in dismissive terms, comments that Obi himself later publicly responded to. The relationship between the two figures has continued to sour amid Okonkwo’s repeated public criticism of Obi’s leadership and decision-making since their shared 2023 campaign.
The comments also arrive against the backdrop of continued turbulence within the broader Obidient movement itself, which has faced internal divisions in recent months, including a reported rebranding effort by a rival faction that sought to distance the platform from Obi entirely and disband structures associated with his leadership following the 2023 election.
As Nigeria’s political landscape continues to shift ahead of the 2027 general election, with Obi now standing as the presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), the debate over the Obidient Movement’s identity and direction reflects deeper unresolved questions about leadership, structure, and cohesion within Nigeria’s youth-driven political opposition.
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